ResearchHighlights

December 1999

Inside This Issue:

Successful equipment proposals require unique spin

Many departments face the same situation: talented researchers with solid research aims, but limited or no money for the instrumentation to accomplish those aims. Although standard research proposals can and very often do include requests for equipment funds, proposals not backed up by seed data have a difficult time finding sponsors, and seed data can be difficult to generate without specialized equipment. However, a number of UM faculty have been successful in achieving funding for purely equipment/instrumentation proposals. Two of the most recently successful are John O’Haver, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Cliff Ochs, Assistant Professor of Biology.

Both professors won awards through the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI), O’Haver in 1998 and Ochs in 1999.  Ochs’ proposal led to six pieces of equipment for a new UM Laboratory for Analysis of Energy and Materials Flux in Biological Systems, which will support research into how materials (“stuff and energy,” as Ochs puts it) are utilized and transformed by living things. O’Haver’s award purchased an Atomic Force Microscope. “It images the topography of materials from the micron to atomic levels,” O’Haver says. “You can look at cells, you can see individual molecules.” Specific equipment and programs notwithstanding, in recent discussions O’Haver and Ochs offered productive insights into developing competitive proposals for equipment.

The two faculty members approached the “problem” of instrumentation and the MRI guidelines from rather different directions. O’Haver started working from a sense of his own urgent need for an AFM. He figured others could use one as well, and he checked around. He and his co-users also did a little dreaming: “what would we need in order to shift the direction of our work?” The AFM proved potentially usable and desirable for a number of researchers in addition to John, and the cost, roughly $160,000, fit within the MRI guidelines without putting too much strain on institutional cost-share. (With MRI, the institution must cost share 30% of the total project costs.)

Ochs “had this idea for a laboratory,” and thought such a lab would be valuable to a lot of people. He identified other researchers within his own department whose research areas were generally linked; the group met at the pre-proposal stage to identify instruments of relatively common use and through the proposal development stage to refine their specific needs within a group-defined common purpose.

O’Haver and Ochs say they found the MRI proposal easier in some ways to write than a standard research proposal. Ochs points out that, whereas a research grant is generally expressing a very specific question or set of questions you wish to address, an equipment grant does not require you to state a hypothesis clearly or defend it as being of great scientific merit. Instead, what’s needed for an equipment grant is a description of an area of research already underway and of the directions in which you hope to expand it with the requested equipment. O’Haver agrees: you’re not “selling the science,” he says, basically because there’s no room in the proposal to do so. Reviewers will be looking more at the history of what’s been done by the researcher(s) with the equipment on hand and at brief descriptions of what research is planned with the new equipment.

The need to create a concise history of research and a clear, enthusiastic description of research plans does, of course, offer challenge enough. O’Haver and Ochs agree that the lengthiest aspect of proposal development involved getting information from a large number of potential users, sometimes from various disciplines. O’Haver spent a good bit of time lining up contributions from people who’d hope to use the ATM: “If we had this, this is how I’d use it, this is the impact it would have on my research, the doors it would open, the currently funded research that would be enhanced.” Ochs, whose proposal was for acquiring several instruments, states the difficulty more in terms of how to “blend” the contributions/needs of multiple investigators in a way that made sense and was readable. “Massaging,” Ochs calls it. Everyone had an interest in the lab-to-be, but in different parts of it. Trying to figure out how to make sense of the combined instrumentation as a facility involved, Ochs, says, “on-going conversation” among the PIs.

Asked what he thought “sold” the proposal, Ochs answers specifically: (1) the instrumentation would get wide use by both students and faculty; (2) a number of faculty had collaborated in the development of the laboratory’s concept; (3) the users were already doing the types of work projected, but the facility would make the work much more do-able and expand their abilities. Also, he notes, he had some very good reviewers from among his departmental colleagues before the proposal was submitted to NSF.

O’Haver credits the demonstrated impact on multiple projects already underway. He worked hard to be sure the proposal would show that this AFM would allow the users to “do what nothing else we have could do.” O’Haver suggests that a proposal for such a program should show real relevance to research patterns, real impact on research directions. “It helps to have a history,” O’Haver stresses. “Not, ‘we are beginning. . . .’ but ‘we’ve already done X; this equipment will take us to Y.’” O’Haver believes this history is probably the reason his first proposal to MRI (for the AFM) was successful and his second was not (“They trashed it.”). For the second proposal, requesting several pieces of equipment, the potential users had solid, exciting plans and hopes, but no provable history in those areas.

Ochs and O’Haver both encourage researchers to contact them about making use of the MRI-purchased equipment. O’Haver’s AFM is already available for use, and Ochs has high hopes for the new lab, which should be up and running during the first part of Spring semester, 2000. Both would also welcome questions about preparing the proposal and managing the award. O’Haver can be contacted at 915-5347 or johaver@olemiss.edu; Ochs can be reached at 915-7562 or byochs@olemiss.edu.

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